Mikki Noroila, Timon Mikki

Mikki Noroila (they/them) works between moving image and the performing arts. Their recent artistic practice has focused on the politics of memory and marginalized histories from the perspective of family histories.




Selected Visual Arts
Yritin šuaha hänet kuvah onnakko hiän kato (2024)
Šulauvunnašta ta erošta (2022)
Borderlands’ counter-archive (2022)
“An Interactive (Sound) Installation” (2020)
Selected Performing Arts
SOFA (2023)
UNDERTONE Creative Associations: Traces of Imminence (2022)
Blaue Frau: RÄDSLOMÄSSA (2018)
TRACK: Human Resource (2018)
TRACK: Track (2017)

Ongoing
Kuvan Kevät 2024


About
mikki.noroila@gmail.com
CV 
(“An Interactive (Sound) Installation”)

sound absorbing acoustic panel, wood, acrylic gesso, oil pastel, a cap

Hi. I'm Mikki and I'm the artist who made this piece.
When I moved into my current apartment, the previous tenant had made an acoustic panel in the living room, the purpose of which is to dampen the room echo. The previous resident sold it to me for 100 euros. It is 238.5 centimeters wide and 123 centimeters high, framed with brown wooden frames and still covered with dark gray fabric. I never really got into how it should be approached from a spatial point of view, when it was so big and the colors were quite dense: in addition to sound it absorbed all the light, energy and, above all, attention. And whenever someone visited for the first time, the first question was: "What is that?" Well, when this corona crisis started, I decided that I wasn't going to do something for the panel. I thought I would make an abstract painting of it. I was in such a hurry, I started painting directly on top of the gray. Of course, nothing came of it, because the gray color absorbed all the color from the paints. I then started covering it with gesso and did at least six layers, after which it started to look like it could be painted. However, I started to wonder if you shouldn't approach the work in a different way. My painting experience is really limited and that picture surface was VERY big compared to it. I tried to think about it from a material point of view: what does it really mean when a white plastic mass is spread over the sound-absorbing material, which practically blocks that material? It will reflect sound and not absorb it! After that, I started thinking about my own artistic history and how it could be used as material for that work. I have done interactive sound performances and installations in the past and I liked the contradiction that works of that type have in relation to painting: an interactive sound work usually sets the expectation that it and with it sound will be produced. On the other hand, a painting does not do that in principle, it is silent. I called it "An Interactive (Sound) Installation." (Sound) in parentheses because it can also be just an ordinary interactive installation. It's in quotation marks because it's not really an interactive (sound) installation. It's a painting. Or a sculpture. Or a performance?